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If you're going to put Austin on the short list, you have to include Houston. Much deeper and more diverse restaurant scene, even if only by sheer numbers, and while the fine dining scene needs improvement, the ethnic/international restaurant scene is easily top 5, I'd argue top 3, in the country. Las Vegas should be on the list somewhere too; though this is from someone who's purposely never eaten a meal on the Strip. I love visiting New Orleans, but I think it's actually a contender for "most overrated" food city in the country. The culinary offerings are just one-dimensionally tied to Cajun/Creole/Southern influences, with maybe the odd Vietnamese restaurant thrown in. Beyond that, restaurant pickings start to get slim. The old guard restaurants are mostly coasting on their laurels, and the new wave of Southern/Creole-influenced cooking, while enjoyable, is nothing you can't find in any Southern city with a strong culinary scene, e.g. Atlanta, Charleston, Houston, etc.
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Jul 30, 2013 11:32
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mindphlux posted:I don't know man, I'd argue against Houston. For me, Austin makes the list because of number nationally recognized chefs, and a very vibrant street food + bbq scene. I'm not an expert on Houston or anything (I was only born there...), but for me it just doesn't stack up. The amusing thing is that outsiders, especially national food writers, like to pigeonhole Houston as nothing but BBQ, burgers, and Tex Mex, and that's really how I'd sum up most of Austin. Actually, BBQ is the only food category where I'd say Austin beats Houston. If you're talking about street food (granted, you'd have to change this to rustic mom and pop cooking spread out among many suburban strip malls), Houston has to rank near the top of the country by sheer volume alone: 500+ Mexican (not Tex-Mex) restaurants, 250+ Vietnamese restaurants, 150+ Cajun/Creole restaurants, 150+ Indian/Pakistani restaurants, and dozens of authentic Chinese, Colombian, other South American, Salvadoran, other Central American, West African, Korean, Ethiopian, and Middle Eastern restaurants. I've been spending the past year travelling across major food cities with a focus on street food joints, and I feel very comfortable saying Houston has the strongest Vietnamese and Indo-Pakistani restaurant scenes in the country, and probably Mexican depending on how the regional breakdown of the population fits your food preferences. Austin doesn't even come close in any of those categories; save for a few odd standouts across the board (Asia Cafe and Din Ho for Chinese, New India and Swad for Indian, Rio and Sao Paulo's for Brazilian, etc), the street food scene is mostly white hipsters doing toned down food truck fare or expensive Americanized bistro fare. I love visiting Austin and touring the restaurant scene (which seems to go through trends and have staff move around like crazy every few months), but I always come back to Houston grateful to the vast diversity there. Houston still has to do some work on the high end chef scene, and that's tough because right now there's a big disconnect between the people that are doing interesting things and the people that are good at capturing PR attention. That said, there are a few really cool high end restaurants that may not go through the luxury routines of your average Michelin candidate, but offer exciting and unique food that draws from the city's vast international influences as a whole, instead of the usual cookie cutter post-culinary school New American fare. Note: I realize that maybe 3 people in this thread might actually care about Houston vs. Austin, but, hey, I think it's a point worth making. Maybe later I'll try to do a set of tier rankings based solely on street food and international fare.
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Jul 31, 2013 05:48
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oh em gee bee ess posted:Isn't Houston also the 4th biggest city in the country? Well yeah, that's a big part of it. It's also why New York, Chicago, and L.A. have to come up at some point in the conversation.
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Jul 31, 2013 07:03
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